From Petri Dishes to Model Ecosystems

How Can Materials Chemists Contribute to Food Supply Security in the Age of AI and Robotics?

Global factors are compromising the security of the food supply. Many of us in our community might be unsure about how to help with our seemingly inapplicable expertise. In this piece, I describe how materials chemistry and materials chemists will be essential in addressing this problem, but not only in the way we might think. There is a gigantic and largely unexplored opportunity for real societal impact if we accept a broader view of what academic materials chemistry can be.

Novel Imaging Modalities Shedding Light on Plant Biology: Start Small and Grow Big

The acquisition of quantitative information on plant development across a range of temporal and spatial scales is essential to understand the mechanisms of plant growth. Recent years have shown the emergence of imaging methodologies that enable the capture and analysis of plant growth, from the dynamics of molecules within cells to the measurement of morphometricand physiological traits in field-grown plants. In some instances, these imaging methods can be parallelized across multiple samples to increase throughput. When high throughput is combined with high temporal and spatial resolution, the resulting image-derived data sets could be combined with molecular large-scale data sets to enable unprecedented systems-level computational modeling. Such image-driven functional genomics studies may be expected to appear at an accelerating rate in the near future given the early success of the foundational efforts reviewed here. We present new imaging modalities and review how they have enabled a better understanding of plant growth from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale.

Stress response to CO2 deprivation by Arabidopsis thaliana in plant cultures

After being the standard plant propagation protocol for decades, cultures of Arabidopsis thaliana sealed with Parafilm remain common today out of practicality, habit, or necessity (as in co-cultures with microorganisms). Regardless of concerns over the aeration of these cultures, no investigation has explored the CO₂ transport inside these cultures and its effect on the plants. Thereby, it was impossible to assess whether Parafilm-seals used today or in thousands of older papers in the literature constitute a treatment, and whether this treatment could potentially affect the study of other treatments.For the first time we report the CO₂ concentrations in Parafilm-sealed cultures of A. thaliana with a 1 minute temporal resolution, and the transcriptome comparison with aerated cultures. The data show significant CO₂ deprivation to the plants, a drastic suppression of photosynthesis, respiration, starch accumulation, chlorophyll biosynthesis, and an increased accumulation of reactive oxygen species. Most importantly, CO₂ deprivation occurs as soon as the cotyledons emerge. Gene expression analysis indicates a significant alteration of 35% of the pathways when compared to aerated cultures, especially in stress response and secondary metabolism processes. On the other hand, the observed increase in the production of glucosinolates and flavonoids suggests intriguing possibilities for CO₂ deprivation as an organic biofortification treatment in high-value crops.